“I’m okay.”
“Not quite. I won’t ask if you’ll pass this on. You wouldn’t even if a colleague hadn’t asked you for help.” At the shake of her head, he kissed her hair again, then eased her back so their eyes met. “You need to prove you can get through it.”
“I am getting through it.”
“You are. But I think you forget you need to get through nothing alone.”
“She was older than I was. Twice my age. Still . . .”
He stroked her back when she shuddered, just one hard tremor. “Still. Young, defenseless, innocent.”
“I’d already stopped being innocent. I was . . . When I was at the morgue, I looked at her, and I thought, that could’ve been me on the slab. If I hadn’t put him on one first, it could’ve been me. He’d have killed me sooner or later, or worse, turned me into a thing. Putting him there first had to be done, and that’s that. She didn’t have a chance, not even the chance I did. A good home, parents who loved her, and who’ll be broken, some pieces of them always broken now. But she didn’t have the chance I did. I could never pass her on.”
“No, you never could.”
She held and was held another minute, then stepped back. “I was wishing I had time to go beat the living crap out of a sparring droid.”
“Ah.” He had to smile. “A never-fail for you.”
“Yeah. This was better.”
He picked up her coffee, handed it to her. “Taking a blocker for the headache would be better yet.”
“It’s not so bad, not so bad now. I’ll work it off.”
“The pizza I ordered should help.”
“You ordered pizza?” The part of her that yearned warred against the part of her that wanted to maintain discipline. “I’ve told you not to keep buying food for my cops. You’ll spoil and corrupt them.”
“There’s only one cop I’m interested in spoiling and corrupting, and pizza happens to be a weakness of hers.”
She drank her coffee doing her best to scowl at him over the rim. “Did you get pepperoni?”
5
FEENEY CHOMPED DOWN ON A LOADED SLICE. He stood at the conference table, focused on the pie while Jamie and McNab attacked a second one. Her former partner, now captain of the Electronic Detectives Division managed to balance what was left of the slice and what appeared to be a tube of cream soda while studying crime scene photos Peabody had yet to tack to the murder board.
He’d had his hair chopped recently, Eve noted, but it did little to combat the spring of ginger and wires of gray that spooled through it. His face, weathered and worn, drooped like a sleepy hound’s. She figured he’d bought the shit-brown jacket he’d paired with wrinkled trousers before his best boy, McNab, had been weaned from his mother’s tit.
In contrast, the young EDD ace and Peabody’s cohab sizzled in atomic red cargos and a tee the color of radioactive egg yolks scrambled with lightning bolts. His long blond hair was tucked back from his thin, pretty face in a slinky braid.
Since it was there, Eve scooped up a slice.
“You okay having Jamie work on this?” she asked Feeney.
“He’s going to push on it anyway. It’s better if he does it where I can keep my eye on him.” He took a swig of cream soda. “He’s going to be rocky right off, but he’ll steady up. I knew Deena, too. Good kid.” He kept his eyes on the crime scene photos. “Sick fuck. This one’s going to spread through the department. You’ll have more cops lining up for detail on this than you can use.”
“How well do you know MacMasters?”
“We worked a few together, knocked back some brews together. Good cop.”
It was, she knew, Feeney’s highest praise.
“You look at this, Dallas, and you think—as a cop,
as a father—you can do everything right, do the job, keep it clean, and you still can’t protect your own kid from something like this. You think you can, even though you know what’s out there, you have to think you can. Then something like this brings it right home, right in the front door. And you know you can’t.”
He shook his head, but it didn’t budge the anger on his face. “We want to believe we can protect our own.” Then he paused, took another long drink. “I was going to head out with the wife to New Jersey this afternoon, a cookout at our boy’s. New Jersey for Christ’s sake,” he added with the deliberate disdain of a native New Yorker.